A South Australian farmer has revisited failed attempts to grow dates set up more than a century ago – and he is more than making a go of it.

Australia has the perfect environment for date production, no where is too hot for a date palm, so it is surprising that Mr Christopherson’s brainchild is one of only a few productive plantations in the country.

With dates selling for $20 a kilogram and able to thrive on reclaimed effluent Mr Christopherson, is confident within a few years he could have himself a nice little earner.

Flinders' Ranges Dates began 10 years ago when Mr Christopherson tracked down the experimental date plots around Maree, in South Australia’s north.

"A hundred years later those trees were still going strong," Mr Christopherson said.

"Not strong - because they had so many offshoots on them they couldn’t bear fruit. The offshoots need to be taken off the tree. Also in a lot of cases they weren’t getting a lot of water - but they had hung in there and that was the main thing to keep the genetic material going."

Mr Christopherson, with the help of his daughter and son-in-law, began the arduous task of transplanting the offshoots. The shoots that grow at the base of the palm and are genetically identical to the parent plant. Removing the offshoot will allow a tree to bare fruit again and the offshoot will produce the same quality fruit as the parent plant.

Through a process of trial and error, the family learnt that the trees need to be hand pollinated in order to get decent fruit.

Rare prize

But the family is being rewarded for its hard work. Flinders' Ranges Dates produces varieties of fruit that are highly prized in the Middle East.

"This plantation produces varieties that can be eaten in their kalal state, that is when it is hard and still yellow. It’s crispy but very, very sweet."

Helen Zubrinich believes these dates are the only true fresh dates available in Australia, 99 per cent of dates consumed here are imported.

"Why is that? Why can’t we get hold of fresh dates off the tree now? It can be a packaging problem because they are so soft they don’t transport as well as a dried date and I suppose they stick to the easier method."

While it is a tender fruit, one thing they have in their favour is they can be frozen.

"As soon as they are ripe enough we freeze them right away. We don’t lose any quality of fruit in the taste and you can freeze them for as long as you like and they don’t change at all."

Mr Christopherson and his family have been harvesting for two years. Last year they only took 50 kilograms, this year they are hoping for half a tonne and in four or five years they want to be producing as many as 12 tonnes.

Nature’s water pump

The hitch is the dates need water. While there is plenty of sunshine and the is temperature right, the region is lucky to get 230 millimetres of rain in a year.

Mr Christopherson has been very inventive in his measures to fully utilise the plantation’s little water or reclaimed effluent.

"In this area you can get to nine feet of evaporation a year and we needed that water," he said.

"So we covered it with Coke bottles half-filled with water so they floated at their maximum width and the water in them stops them from blowing away. We save, with those 31,000 bottles on that pond, somewhere between 500,000 to 600,000 gallons a year. "

That is two million litres of water a year.

Flinders' Ranges Dates only takes the effluent from the small settlement of Stirling North, which is on the fringe of Port Augusta. There is a belief that the industry could use the millions of litres of treated waste that pours out of the channel into the nearby Spencer Gulf.

The town’s senior environmental officer Bob Rutter believes the 1.5 million litres of effluent that flows into the gulf could be used far more productively.

"We could use it for date palms, which bring in something like $20,000 per tonne," Mr Rutter said.

"That sort of effluent volume would support a plantation of about 8,000 palms, which could bring an income of something like $16 million a year."

There could be a burgeoning date industry in Australia, with the country’s hot, dry inland areas and highly saline water. It baffles Mr Rutter why there is not.

"They are known as nature’s water pump. So where you have dryland salinity these would be the ideal plant for that area to produce a very valuable crop."

But while the market for fresh dates is still small. There is confidence that Mr Christopherson’s discovery raises the hope of a full-scale Australian date industry, not to mention fresh dates for Australian consumers.

Current world production of seafood is almost 130 million tonnes a year, with 90+ million tonnes from the wild and over 30+ million tonnes from aquaculture.

Australia is the world's third largest wheat exporter with about a 16 per cent global market share.

Around two-thirds of Zimbabwe's workforce rely on agriculture for employment.

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